Need advice please!-medical debt

[jensen]

Due to my son's serious illness we have a medical debt of over $175,000. My husband is the only one who works as I have been ill too & have not been abel to get back to work. We don't own any property etc. But do have about $40,000 in our checkin & saving accounts. My husbands monthly income is not enough to cover my sons medication & doctor appointments even though we do have insurance coverage. We have started using money from our bank accounts to get by every month. We also make payments for his school fees. We were originally underinsured - hence the medical debt. We have no cc. debt as we avoid using cc. unless we can pay it off in full every month. We have a monthly car payment which will go on until 2013. We live in CA & although we may qualify for chp. 7 under the 'means' test our having money in our bank accounts will most probably disqualify us. What advise can anyone give us? If we loose the money in our bank account we would not have enough for our son's medical treatment which is going to be long term. We have not been sued yet but are expecting that to happen soon. I have been reading these forums & everyone gives such good advise that I thought I 'd post & see if someone could give us some tips.

[researchnerd]

I am not sure, but I think that if you can prove that you need that savings to pay ongoing medical expenses (and it sounds like you can), you can file for an exemption and still qualify for Ch7. I'd recommend going for a consultation with a BK attorney (or three), who can give you a better idea of what your options are.

[justbroke]

The money in the bank will not dis-qualify. Also California System 2, if you were going to use that, provides about $21K for each debtor (husband and wife) to exempt on property, if you don't claim a homestead.

Perhaps you can start interviewing several attorneys to see how they would handle this. There are questions like, is your husbands current medical insurance still considered "under-insured" or is it sufficient going forward? Are you anticipating any major medical insurance short-falls any time real soon? '

I'm assuming you're still under-insured since you claim that you need the money in the account to deal with the future medical expense.

[jensen]

Thank you researchnerd- that gives us some hope if we will be able to keep the money. We are on the look out for an attornney.
Justbroke, thank you for your advise too. My son's condition is such that we don't know when he can get ill again & need hospitalization. We really don't know what type of future he has & hence we want to keep this money due to that. Filing bk we will not be able to save a penny for quite a while.
As for my husbands insurance - starting this year there have been changes & we are hoping that any future medical issues will be at least partially covered & we won't have to pocket out very much. Last year was when all this happened & our policy was written in a different state & therefore was only covered by that state's laws even though the insurance was based in CA.
His medication though is very expensive & is not fully covered by insurance as there is no generic available on the meds. he has to take.
But thank you so much to both of you - at least we have something that we did not think of that we could ask the lawyer to look into.